Open Q - organisational systems
Thursday, 12 February 2026 03:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hwariumQuestion to moots and flyby visitors alike: how do you organise your life?! What do you use to track the myriad of sisyphean tasks that composite the human existence: chores, life admin, hobbies, social commitments and big events, side projects, reading lists, expense tracking and budgeting, journalling, article archiving, correspondance..... .... ..or perhaps do you just let go and speedrun raw.
I'm thinking about resetting some systems because items have been slipping off my mind into the ether. I'm currently looking at some kind of app for reoccurring tasks (ticktick / things 3 / microsoft to-do) and consolidating calendars, but would love to know what has worked, or not worked, for this corner of the internet.
Current profile:- digital systems: android phone + pc + OS + iOS
- journalling, planning, expense tracking, general list-making: pen and paper (jibun techo + leuchtturm)
- budgeting: excel
- thoughts dump, flash to-dos, gym notes: google keep
- holiday planning: google maps and google sheets
- hobby tracking: todoist but ineffective
no subject
Date: 12 February 2026 06:53 am (UTC)MY TIME HAS COME. I THINK ABOUT LIFE ORGANISATION TECHNIQUES ALL THE TIME FOR FUN. IT'S MY HOBBY. no for real it really is haha
The ideal setup is really dependent on the individual and your needs and habits though. Generally I feel a good rule of thumb is to take stock of what you already naturally do and then build around it as much as possible, rather than try to introduce new organisational tools that just end up adding layers of friction.
The other good rule of thumb for me, at least, is that less is more haha. YMMV here—some people like to have everything in one godlike bucket of a life organisational app to rule them all, some people like discrete tools for specific things. I lean more towards the bucket end, though I know there are some things my bucket app can't do well so that's where other things come in.
My bucket app is Obsidian. It contains:
- journal (i make daily, weekly, monthly notes and a bigger yearly reflection note)
- life admin (notes on when I last replaced my doorbell batteries, warranty information, serial numbers, running list of things i ordered and am awaiting delivery for, notes from health checkups, how to press buttons in the right sequence to reset whatever devices, etcetc this sort of thing)
- notes on media (books, movies, butai, TV shows, short stories, articles i read online, podcast, whatever)
- thoughts (ideas that pop into my head, ideas i glean from things i read. for e.g. i have a note titled "Memory is preservation" and if I read a book/article that touches on that idea I might pull some quotes and chuck them in this note, or it might go into the book note and I link it here. I'm not really rigid about it)
- travel plans (one note per trip)
- notes on ongoing projects
- wishlists
- really anything else that needs to be recorded somewhere and doesn't fit anywhere else
I subscribe to the basic tier Obsidian sync (US$4/month) for cross-device access. it works very well, but I wanted to throw that out upfront in case you are not willing to pay for sync. There are other free solutions, the official sync is just the easiest to use.
EDIT TO ADD if Obsidian does not work for you, Capacities is my top rec for most people. You can get by just fine on their free tier and I find the way they organise objects very intuitive and powerful.
The things that do not go in Obsidian are:
- Tasks. I actually don't have a task app. All tasks go into my calendar on their own "Life admin" calendar. This is what I mean by building around tools you already use; I am already a very regular user/checker of my calendar, so if a task is in my calendar I will definitely see it. Even if a task has no date associated with it, I just throw it on the earliest free day in my calendar. If I don't want to do it that day I just move it around. But putting tasks on calendar ensure that I keep having to think about when I do them, if not they will perish in a "someday" graveyard.
- If the task is critically time sensitive and I MUST have a blaring alarm go off at a specific time, that gets set directly on my phone.
- Grocery lists: I just use Reminders on my phone cos I can look at it on my Apple Watch while I'm in the supermarket.
- Budgeting: I use Actual Budget, but I feel like there's no reason not to stick with your excel sheet if you like it. I'm just lazy to spreadsheet.
- Bookmarks and articles I might want to read later: I use Linkding, but I usually recommend Raindrop to anyone who doesn't want to futz with self-hosting (or pay for it on Pikapods).
- Actual read later: Wallabag, but I'd recommend Instapaper for most people who want a basic free alternative (that can also sync with your ereader). I only keep like 20 articles on Wallabag at any time so it doesn't become a black hole. When I clear them, I pluck another 20 from Linkding's unread pile. Usually, by this time, half the things I tossed into Linkding aren't interesting to me any more so I can cull them. I find this works very well to stop my read later from becoming a black hole.
- Article archiving for links I want to keep forever: Singlefile. Obsidian Web Clipper is also really good. I just don't personally like to have the full text of articles cluttering my Obsidian vault.
- TBR pile: Storygraph
Hope this gives you some ideas! VERY happy to discuss further, I love this stuff.
no subject
Date: 12 February 2026 11:50 am (UTC)thank you for sharing!! gosh what a fun read. I DO have questions about housework!! Does that go in your calendar as well? I'm thinking about the switch up between day-to-day habits, to weekly cleans, to some things that you do quarterly or even annually (e.g. vacuuming vs changing your toothbrush) is it a moveable list? an army of individual tasks perfectly scheduled? +++ if your plans change (friend drops in for dinner), do you find it bothersome moving the tasks around to the next weekend?
I will go check out Wallabag and Linkding and raindrop and pikapods AND singlefile, those are sites/apps I've never even heard of so I'm so glad you took the time to refer them!!
hope you're having a good week friend!!
no subject
Date: 12 February 2026 12:12 pm (UTC)Yes housework goes into the life admin calendar, exactly as you described! They are an army of individually scheduled recurring tasks. I don't really have daily things that I need to schedule cos I will naturally remember to do things when daily is their cadence, but change sheets, change toothbrush, wash bathmat, vacuum etc are all in there as recurring anywhere from weekly to quarterly. If my plans change, I can just move that one task to the next free timeslot without messing with the rest of the calendaring.
Because of all this the life admin calendar does look very crowded, so I don't keep it turned on all the time. But I am one of those people who has like a whole bunch of calendars (one for social meetups, one for fun things, one for health-related things, one that's just for miscellaneous things like 'make sure i'm at home at this time to receive parcel') so I'm used to toggling them on and off when I want to see them or not.
Raindrop is very good for bookmarking and read later! Singlefile is a browser extension that saves any page as... a single file... haha. I just save them into a folder of articles that is synced everywhere on my cloud storage. Pikapods, Wallabag and Linkding are like a whole other rabbit hole of selfhosted apps and I feel like it is more techy than most people need, but very interesting to learn about!
Perhaps I should have led with this question (I was too hype to talk about stuff), but what do you find is not working about your current system? Like where is the friction/slippage happening, I'm curious!
no subject
Date: 13 February 2026 12:28 am (UTC)IT'S OKAY I WANT TO DO THE MARKET RESEARCH!!
Life has been inconsistent with big events in the last few years that threw my systems out of a loop, i.e. I drop everything to focus on getting that One Thing Done, and when it's over I realise everything else has been languishing (life admin, exercise, hobbies, everything on the important-not-urgent eisenhower square). Especially around holiday periods with frequent social events, I feel like I'm running life on blinkers only focusing on the Next Thing, that when I have free time, my mind blanks out as to what I'm supposed to be doing or even what I enjoy doing for rest! I don't mind the rush but I dislike that feeling of disassociation. And I've missed appointments recently which has /never/ happened before.
I want to be more mindful of my life and my habits. I'm thinking about creating a dashboard that lets me see, at a glance, what's on, what's coming up, and what's on my mind.
the tension points on the triangle are (1) wanting to minimising screentime esp phone time, (2) acknowledging that I use my phone a lot / phone is always there / phone can be used productively, and (3) avoiding gamification of tasks so that I learn to associate satisfaction with the task itself rather than the acknowledgement of completion an app gives me
A digital calendar might work! I've used google calendar/todoist in school and it worked because of the strict deadlines, but fell off in late uni because it became too hard to manage -> every morning was spent rescheduling to-dos. But perhaps the key is to be more intentional with what is scheduled and have seperate calendars for different items? Food for thought!!
no subject
Date: 14 February 2026 03:10 am (UTC)Thank you for sharing!! It sounds like you have been a bit swamped, so I'm gonna go out on a limb and venture a guess that actually your problem might not be that your current tools aren't working for you but that you simply have too much on your plate to humanly do in the time and energy that you have, like your problem isn't task management, it's energy management? I feel like when this happens the first thing to do is to take stock and subtract as much as you can rather than add on new tools to manage all the things. Are there obligations you can let go of rather than trying to squeeze them in?
I think it's also helpful to really try to clock how much time it takes you to do things cos often it's easy to underestimate this... for a long time I was frustrated with myself for never going to sleep on time, then I stopped to calculate how much time I actually need to do all the wind-down things I want to do (stretch, journal, brush teeth/skincare, read) and I found that I need to block out up to an hour for all this not to feel rushed. In my head, it took like 15-20 minutes, and I just wasn't allocating enough time. Obviously anyone can tell it does not actually take 15-20 minutes when looking at all these activities, but heads are weird.
Minimising phone usage is a whole other topic! Do you have thoughts/ideas for what you think would work best for you?
no subject
Date: 12 February 2026 02:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 13 February 2026 12:02 am (UTC)I have to give a shoutout to Jeff Huang for the calendaring system. I use this text file + calendar system pretty much exactly as he describes for work, and it is really effective for me.
But yes I agree very much different brains different tricks, my brain would get really stressed out having 500 things on the to-do list so it would simply yell at me to do or discard at least 490 of them before writing them down anywhere haha
no subject
Date: 13 February 2026 03:53 am (UTC)I alr use textfiles for note taking (soo much better than onenote or email), and the idea of a cumulative textfile where everything is searchable... reminds me of old .txt game tutorials with ascii art and formatting, how nostalgic
no subject
Date: 14 February 2026 03:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 13 February 2026 03:25 am (UTC)